


Your Lips A Magic World

by bigmoneygator



Series: Under Blue Moon [2]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Cecil POV, Fluff, Gen, M/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-06
Packaged: 2017-12-22 13:57:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/914002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bigmoneygator/pseuds/bigmoneygator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil hums with happiness when Carlos is around. It’s not a sound he makes with air and his vocal cords, not a noise at all, really. It’s more like all of Cecil’s molecules buzzing against each other, vibrating and crashing, making the air sort of shimmer around him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Lips A Magic World

**Author's Note:**

> Companion piece to "Your Sky All Hung With Jewels". I figured it begged an encore.
> 
> [now with a mix](http://8tracks.com/isladelmar/under-blue-moon).

**i**

Cecil likes sweet things. He likes candy and ice cream and coffee creamers flavored like desserts. He misses Dana the intern; she never forgot to keep the break room fridge stocked with caramel-chocolate-coconut creamer. She never questioned him when he requested six packets of sugar. Good interns are so hard to come by.

He can’t remember where his love of decadent, if not always so refined, confections came from. There is a vague memory, tamped down in the back of his mind, of bland steamed broccoli cooked so long it had lost most of its color. Of boiled cabbage that smelled like sick and tasted worse. Those thoughts give Cecil the vaguest impression of childhood, of someone cooking for him in a kitchen bedecked with yellow gingham curtains. 

Cecil is not entirely sure that the memory is real, or if it is, in fact, even his own. He doesn’t really recall his youth, cannot accurately describe any large part of it. If asked, he could provide you with a birthday (the twentieth of January, every year, as is customary), the name of his parents (Jennifer and Tucker), and point out the place he grew up in (the apartment above the barber shop, which Carlos the scientist is currently renting). 

It all seems false, somehow. Like he borrowed the memories from someone, without the intent to return them. Cecil has never decided if lies are vague, so as to not arouse suspicion, or if they are too complicated, the more intricacies weaving a more believable story. Either way, he feels dishonest.

**ii**

Carlos is horrified to find the cabinets in Cecil’s doublewide filled to the brim with boxes of sugared cereal, blue plastic bags of Red Vines, little tupperwares with wrapped hard candies.

“How are you not a diabetic?” Carlos asks, shaking one of the tupperwares filled with the fruit and cream candies Cecil is most fond of. “How does your pancreas even still function?”

Cecil doesn’t have an answer. He shrugs. 

The next time Carlos comes over, he brings a bag of groceries from the Green Market. Cecil has a very sophisticated collection of chef’s knives and copper-bottomed cookware, almost entirely for self defense against the inevitable, if slightly vague, invasion of Night Vale by forces unknown and unknowable. Carlos puts them to good use now, slicing red peppers and onions for stir fry. Carlos has the most lovely hands. Cecil is mesmerized by his quick fingers, his sure and steady grace. 

“What’s so interesting?” Carlos huffs as he turns on the stove.

“Nothing,” Cecil said. “You. I guess.”

Carlos looks at him over the edge of his smart rimless glasses. “Oh,” he says. “Neat.” He flashes a winning grin and Cecil melts like a chocolate bar.

**iii**

Cecil hums with happiness when Carlos is around. It’s not a sound he makes with air and his vocal cords, not a noise at all, really. It’s more like all of Cecil’s molecules buzzing against each other, vibrating and crashing, making the air sort of shimmer around him.

It’s gotten to the point that just a mere glance of a pickup truck, an errant thought of lab goggles, the sight of a white lab coat can set Cecil to purring like a cat. He spends a lot of time in the men’s room at the station, petting Khoshekh, who seems to be the only one who truly understands what it’s like to set to droning like an airplane motor when someone you love is nearby. 

Carlos searches for an explanation for the earthquakes that nobody feels. For a man who spends so much time speaking, Cecil is exceptionally terrible with words. He tries to explain it to Carlos without them, running his buzzing fingers through Carlos’ salt and pepper locks, finally starting to grow back long and perfect. He puts his whirring knee against Carlos’ on the couch. 

Carlos doesn’t understand, not even when he puts his ear to Cecil’s chest and says, “That’s funny. Your heart sounds like the desert.”

**iv**

Cecil didn’t know he had a scent until he smells it on Carlos after it had rubbed off on him. Burnt sugar, caramel, melted vanilla ice cream smell. He always thought that he smelled like the station, like new wood furniture and lemon scented floor wax and very faintly of mold. Carlos assures him that the candy smell is most definitely his own. He starts wearing cologne, on the off chance that whatever is in the dog park likes treats as much as he does.

**v**

The secret to Cecil’s shapeshifting is simple: he becomes whatever the person looking needs to see. It is an entirely autonomous response, and one that Cecil could never quite control. Like the adrenaline that pumped out of his kidneys when a hooded figure appeared in front of his car. Like the dopamine that drowns his nerves around his beloved Carlos.

Cecil is embarrassed when Carlos comments that his appearance has finally stabilized. He does not admit that he could feel his cells fighting with one another over what to become when Carlos was near. His body did not know what Carlos wanted. What he needed. 

All of the energy that used to be wasted on Cecil’s atomic structure battling itself around Carlos is now diverted to the humming. Cecil has become a walking vibrating string theory.

**vi**

One sunrise, as they are laying on the pullout couch in Carlos’ apartment that used to be Cecil’s parents’ apartment, having spent the night alternating between actually sleeping and kicking each other in the shins, Cecil admits that he isn’t sure how old he is.

He admits that the memories of spongy yellow birthday cakes and skinned knees and horrendous cooking seem fabricated. He whispers into Carlos’ hair that he is half-convinced that he wasn’t born at all, that one day he just walked into town from the desert. That perhaps he came into existence exactly how he is, brought forth into this world like a star. 

“Even stars are born,” Carlos says, threading his fingers with Cecil’s. “Even stars have a lifespan.”

“Are you sure?” Cecil asks. 

"This isn’t going to turn into another fight about mountains, is it?” Carlos asks. 

“Mountains are a conspiracy,” Cecil says. “Stars are very real. I can see them every night.”

Carlos sighs. Not the sad sigh of a man exhausted, nor the aggravated sigh of a man at wit’s end. He sighs like a man besotted, like a man who can’t stop listening to his lover’s voice. He kisses Cecil’s neck. 

“I don’t care if you were postulated into existence by philosophers in Ancient Greece,” Carlos says. “I don’t care if you were created by the unholy union of physics and calculus.”

“Is that possible?”

“Which?”

“The physics one.”

“I don’t know,” Carlos laughs.

“We should try it,” Cecil says excitedly. 

“One day,” Carlos says. “I promise.”

They watch the sun rise through the slats of Carlos’ venetian blinds. The same venetian blinds that Cecil can just barely remember watching countless sunrises through as a boy.


End file.
